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Nothing about the freedom of the software has to do with whether or not you compensate the authors for creating it.

If you take free software and never consider paying its developer for making it, despite them providing you freedom, choice, and a degree of trust in the software you can not have with proprietary code, then you are the kind of person to blame for why proprietary software is so rampant today.

For example, I donate $200 to the Document Foundation every year to match the cost of an annual subscription to Office 365 plus a 33% bonus for respecting my freedom.



As a practical matter, few people pay for open-source software. In theory, the two issues are orthogonal, but in reality, they are not.


ahem SUSE and RedHat are examples of companies that sell free software.




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